Relationships Are Always Complex. People

Relationships are always complex. People are connected to each other in strange ways and they often do things that do not make much sense. However, some people do things that make absolute sense when we stop and look at motives and desires. What we learn about relations in the Aspern Papers that they can be quiet multifarious. The narrator in the story will do anything to get his hands on the Aspern Papers. Tita has her own motives for acquiring what she wants as well. Even the aunt has her reasons for behaving the way she does. What we find out about human relations from these characters is that things are never what they seems and there is generally something more going on beneath the surface. The Aspern Papers reveals that hidden motives play more of a part in out lives than we would like to expect.

The narrator has the most obvious motive. His need for the papers causes him to befriend Tita and her aunt. At the beginning of the novel he worms his way into the house by admitting he had:

Studies to pursue; that I wanted quiet; that I delighted in a garden and had vainly sought one up and down the city; that I would undertake that before another month was over the dear old house should be smothered in flowers. I think it was the flowers that won my suit, for I afterward found that Miss Tita (for such the name of this high tremulous spinster proved somewhat incongruously to be) had an insatiable appetite for them" (James 18).

Here we see how the narrator is already working everything he can into his favor. It is shameless how the narrator uses Tita throughout the novel.

In the end, however, he cannot give into her manipulation. He says:

could not accept. I could not, for a bundle of tattered papers, marry a ridiculous, pathetic, provincial old woman. It was a proof that she did not think the idea would come to me, her having determined to suggest it herself in that practical, argumentative, heroic way, in which the timidity however had been so much more striking than the boldness that her reasons appeared to come first and her feelings afterward. (James 131-2)

This ending of the novel illustrates that despite the most thought out and cleverly devised plans, some things just do not work out the way we intend. The narrator could not justify paying "the price" for the papers so he had to let them go. The narrator is also shocked that he could be taken by Tita, woman so naive.

Ellen Brown maintains that the Aspern Papers depicts the "ethical, emotional, and even physical damage that people inflict when they manipulate others for their own ends" (Brown 277). This type of manipulation begins with the narrator and the very reason for his visit. The manipulation continues as the narrator ingratiates himself to Tita and her aunt. He is very calculating and he does not seem to mind admitting this. He may be sad about the aunt's death, but it does not take him a long time to get on his original track.

Leon Edel contend that the novel moves, "with the rhythmic pace and tension of a mystery story; and the double climax - the unmasking of the 'publishing scoundrel' and the proposal made to him by the middle-aged niece, that he marry her and receive the Aspern papers as a 'dowry'" (Edel) give the story "high drama" (Edel). The drama is surprising and that makes the story more believable and even shocking.

Daniel Schneider notes that the Aspern Papers is about "life and liberty vs. death and enslavement" (Schneider 47). This is true and certainly something we see unfold by the end of the novel. None of the characters, save the aunt, actually get what it is they want. The narrator begins on a search that may give him life but he only becomes a victim of death and enslavement - all brought on primarily by the aunt. Tita is enslaved as well because she cannot have what she wants even with the most precious bargaining chip she owns.